* This seminar was originally scheduled for January 26, but postponed due to the winter storm to this Monday, February 2nd, starting 30 minutes earlier than our traditional ESE seminar time slot.

Register today for the 2nd seminar of the ESE Spring 2026 Seminar Series: The Janak Raj Lectures. This seminar is available online only via Zoom. 

Presented by:  Srijib Mukherjee, Senior Scientist, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Department of Energy

REGISTER HERE

TIME: 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM Eastern Time 
LOCATION - ZOOM MEETING link to be sent prior to the seminar date
CONTACT US: inesei@lehigh.edu     

ABSTRACT:  Over the past few years, a strange industrial electricity customer has taken the industry by storm—Bitcoin mining. Savvy investors flocked to deregulated electricity markets to capture recently created price distortions in spot electricity pricing, or to regulated markets with friendly tariffs. The bitcoin mines themselves look more like datacenter infrastructure than any traditional mine. Some of these ventures flourished and were a net good to their community by providing new revenue to suppliers, struggling with co-located generation assets, tax revenue to communities and opportunities for skilled labor that had previously been scarce. Bitcoin mining has become a large source of demand for US grids. The opportunity for coordination with grid operators varies drastically by region. Bitcoin mining operations are highly elastic, with clear dollar/MWh denominated revenue which causes frequent operational curtailment. There is a lack of research on bitcoin mining as an elastic source of demand response incorporating expected mining revenue, and operational challenges grid operators face with the magnitude of mining curtailing operations based on spot prices. There is a general lack of understanding of bitcoin mining revenue mechanisms, which lead to gross overestimations of its projected demand.  
 
BIO:  Dr. Srijib Mukherjee is Senior Scientist with US DOE’s Oakridge National Laboratory with a Joint Professor appointment at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN. Srijib comes with 35 years of research, engineering, academic and management experience in Climate Science impacts to Electrical Power System Operations, Energy Markets, Energy Storage Technologies, and Electric Vehicle Transportation adoption challenges across the globe. Srijib has an MBA in Finance from Duke University, Ph.D. and MSEE from the University of Miami and a B.E. (in Electrical Power Engineering) from The Manipal University. He is a US licensed Electrical Engineer, as a Professional Engineer and is also a NERC Certified Grid Operator, licensed to operate the US Electrical Grid.